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Culture Wars
Yet Morris's own urgent, driving rhythm is a key factor too, seeming to mix the metronomic pulse of dance music with the gutsy snare-cracking style of rock. Meanwhile, according to the sleeve notes by Ian Harrison for the 2008 CD remaster, the melodica motif was allegedly inspired by 1970 one-hit wonder 'Groovin With Mr Bloe'. So there.

Leaning towards the electronic side of the dance-rock axis they so skilfully straddled on this album, 'The Perfect Kiss' would be the first New Order single to be taken from an album, and it also had a tale behind it, albeit not as conventionally told. The penultimate line 'My friend took his final breath' hints at the inspiration for the lyrics which, according to Peter Hook, was 'the true story of an acquaintance who was shot and killed in Moss Side'.

If that hints at the murky side of the nightlife some of the band were witnessing at this point – they were, of course, founders of Manchester's Hacienda nightclub, which proved a victim of its own success when criminal gangs began battling for control of the drug trade there – then 'This Time Of Night' and 'Sub-culture' reflected a different aspect of the same, particularly Sumner and Hook's new-found passion for fetish clubs.

All manner of eye-popping costumes and behaviour were encountered there by the pair and their bandmates, and after the former track references 'pleasure' and 'pain', the latter insists, 'In the end you will submit – it's got to hurt you a little bit'. Peter Hook later admitted: 'It suffered from five-o'clock-in-the-morning lyrics where we couldn't think of anything else for the chorus.'

Then again, New Order were never famed for Pulitzer Prize-worthy words; more so the atmospheres the band could create with music. This reputation was further enhanced by the breathtaking instrumental 'Elegia', edited on the album to around five minutes from a 17-minute original, since made available on expanded reissues of the album [see p87]. This piece had been created for a movie planned by i-D magazine, which never saw the light of day. Morris says it was inspired by Ennio Morricone's western movie soundtracks, and in its original incarnation the 24-hour recording session at Wembley's CTS studios saw Sumner invite the engineer's nephews, Ben and Justin, who'd dropped in after attending school, to repeatedly say their names into the microphone, resulting in the original working title for the track being 'Ben And Justin'. Sadly their contributions didn't make the final cut.

The prominence of Peter Hook's snaking basslines allied to jagged guitar (check out the sheet-metal scrape of the anti-solo on 'Love Vigilantes'), elegant synthscapes, and Bernard Sumner's beguilingly plaintive vocals were forming a template for the New Order sound – and the latter's voice, although it sometimes maintained a tenuous relationship to the intended tune, was all the more charismatic for being a touch amateurish.

Rough Cuts
Hook has talked fondly of the 'unintentional strained quality' of Sumner's vocals 'as he tried to fit into the track', which he feels was later slightly spoilt when producer John Robie, who would produce several subsequent singles and remixes, pointed out that Sumner was often singing in a key his voice struggled with. The bassist felt that 'correcting' this aspect of the band's sound set them on a slippery slope towards writing more conventionally, and moving away from the DIY ethos of the punk scene that spawned them.

On tracks such as 'Face Up' you can see (hear) his point – Sumner strains to hit the upper register notes and it adds a faint sense of desperation to his delivery as he relates how he 'cannot bear the thought of you'.

Cover Up
Perhaps partly due to such unvarnished charm, the band remains proud of the finished product. The packaging was pretty special too, and unconventional as ever, with Factory art supremo Peter Saville deciding there should be photographs of New Order's members on the sleeve for the first time, as part of his 'demystification' process. But they did it back to front compared to the usual band hierarchy, with drummer Stephen Morris gracing the cover before polaroid portraits of Gillian Gilbert (guitar/keyboards), Peter Hook and, bringing up the rear, frontman Bernard Sumner featured inside. The finishing touch was to sheath the whole album with tracing paper.

In his 2016 memoir Substance, Hook singles out Low-life as his favourite New Order album. 'The combination of the sequencers and the rock side was perfectly balanced. We were very much together.' And Morris has echoed those sentiments, saying this third album was when 'we grew up and became a proper band'.

Thirty-seven years on, New Order's affirmatory Low-life continues to mature more gracefully than perhaps Hook, Morris et al might ever have imagined.